Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

by Jack Spicer

What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water.  Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor?  It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap.  Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated.  How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

spray-painted high on the overpass,
each letter a good foot long,
and I try to picture the writer
hanging from a rope
between midnight and dawn
the weight of his love swaying,
making a trembling
N and G, his mind at work
with the apostrophe—
the grammar of loss—
and his resistance to hyperbole,
no exclamation point
but a period at the end
that shows a heart not given
to exaggeration,
a heart that’s direct with a nofooling
around approach,
and I wonder if he tested the rope
before tying it to the only tree I can see
that would bear his weight,
or if he didn’t care about the freefall
of thirty or more feet
as he locked his wrist to form such
straight T’s,
and still managed, dangling, to flex
for the C and G,
knowing as he did, I’m sure,
the lover would ride this way each day
until she found a way around,
a winding back road with trees
and roadside
tiger lilies, maybe a stream, a
white house, white fence,
a dog in the yard
miles
from this black-letter, open-book
in-your-face missing
that the rain or Turnpike road
crew
will soon wash off.
—Len Roberts

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided lgiht. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

1979, robert haas.

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i loved you in october
when you hid behind your hair
and rode your shadow
in the corners of the house

and in november you invaded
filling the air
above my bed with dreams
cries for some kind of help
on my inner ear

in december i held your hands
one afternoon; the light failed
it came back on
in a dawn on the scottish coast
you singing us ashore

now it is january, you are fading
into your double
jewels on his cape, your shadow on the snow,
you slide away on wind, the crystal air
carries your new songs in snatches thru the windows
of our sad, high, pretty rooms

-di prima

i held myself too open, i forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that i
with all i did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

as one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, i held you to me: i saw you
turn red from me. how could anyone express
what took place between us? we made up for everything
there was never time for. i matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

for i don't think back; all that i am
stirs me because of you. i don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. longing leads out too often
into vagueness. why should i cast myself, when,
for all i know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

 

-rilke.